The question
in the A level examinations will be on a “theme”
– a central concern or idea which may form the focus of the poem or be an
integral part of its meaning. You will
be asked to explore the presentation of this “theme” in one named poem and one
other poem of your choice.
These
“themes” could include, but not be limited to: an emotion
– such as love, loss, sorrow, joy; the evocation
of “place”, as the subject of the poem or as the setting for the poem; the
treatment of abstract concepts such
as Time, or Death, or Religion; a “happening”
such as War, Childhood, Marriage; the relationships
between men and women. The range is
very broad. Where a poem lends itself to
suggesting a particular theme, this has been noted in the explication. However, these suggestions are not
exhaustive; one of the skills to be mastered is to know the texts well enough
to be able to link them to themes which may not be immediately obvious.
In addition
to this, there is one “theme” which seems to run through most of the selection,
so it has been explored and illustrated below.
Liminal Spaces
Liminal means
“threshold”, the part of a door that
you step across to move from one space to another. Liminality
is the space between different states – between night and day (dawn), between
day and night (twilight), between life and death, between out and in.
Most of the poems in the selection are
similarly concerned with situations where the poet/persona, or the setting, or
the subject matter, or more than one of these, are “in between” states or
spaces.
Tennyson
In “In Memoriam – VII”, Tennyson seems unable to move on from the
living presence of Hallam on the street he revisits; “XCV” is set between night and day – a night when he seems to move
from sorrow to reconciliation; the “Maud”
poems are full of liminal images – “I.xi” is set between the “solid ground” and “sweet heavens”; “I.xviii”
is set at the point where Maud is both “his” and “not his” – he is on the verge
of a consummation of their love, but it is never realised; Maud does not “Come into the Garden” – we leave the narrator still waiting; II.iv
”O that ‘twere possible” imagines
Maud as a ghost, caught between life and death and the narrator as a confused “wasted frame”.
Emily & Charlotte Bronte – The Visionary
The setting is inside, but the focus
is on the visitor coming through the winter weather to visit her. She is in a “limbo”, where the Visionary is
anticipated (as in “Come into the garden,
Maud”) but not yet realised.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Grief”
explores the emotion of the title, with a central image of a statue, lifelike,
but dead and unable to “move on”; The subject of “Died...” is both alive and dead at the same time; they are talking
about him as if alive, even as his obituary notice travels to them from London.
Robert Browning
The Duke in “My Last Duchess” is, literally,
“between” Duchesses; In “Home Thoughts…”,
the poet is in Italy but casting his thoughts toward England, and is thus
caught between the two; the focus of “Meeting
at Night” is in the space between “not with the beloved” and “with the
beloved”; In “Love in a Life” the
focus is on the emptiness between the beloved being “not found” and “found” and
remains unresolved.
Charlotte Bronte
All of the poems in the selection by
Charlotte Bronte are set in liminal space. “The
Autumn day” is set at Twilight: “The
house was still…” is also set at twilight, and the birds’ songs occupy the
space between indoors (the canary) and outdoors (the free bird); “I now had only to retrace” recounts the
point at which the poet turns back from her outward walk to head for home; “The Nurse believed…” has a question at
its heart – is the man alive or dead?; ”Stanzas”
opens with a statement that puts the poet in a space between the world of the
imagination and the real world.
Christina Rossetti
“Remember”
explores memory – the place where the dead still exist for the living; an “Echo” exists in the space between the
first sound and the return (as in the songs between the birds in “The house was still”); “May” captures the very moment when she “passes” from a feeling of hope and joy
to one of desolation, as Tennyson does in reverse in XCV; “Somewhere or other” by
its title suggests that the poet is caught between anticipation and
consummation with only a “hedge between”.
Thomas Hardy
In “At the Inn”, the poet describes the two “As we seemed we were not” – they existed
both as lovers, to the innkeeper, but were not; lovers and yet not lovers (like
the alive/dead man in “Died…” or in “The Nurse…”); In “I Look into My Glass”, a mirror is a space between the reality and
the reflection in the mirror, where Hardy seems to exist as both young, on the
inside, and old, on the outside; even “Drummer
Hodge” seems to lie between England, where he was born, and Africa, where
his body is, as if a bit of England has been transported out there; “A wife in London” captures the time
between receiving notice of her husband’s death and a letter written in the
dead man’s hand – again, there was a moment where he was both alive AND dead; “The Darkling Thrush” is set at the turn
of the year and the turn of the century – New Year’s Eve, 1899. A liminal space indeed.
